7 ms·

Where's my PC Bullshit Bingo (TM) card? I need to cross off a couple of fields: 1) reducing "diversity" to "different skin colors" 2) fixating on the Third-Re

by adwn 5y ago

Where's my PC Bullshit Bingo (TM) card? I need to cross off a couple of fields: 1) reducing "diversity" to "different skin colors" 2) fixating on the Third-Reich-esque concept of "human race" 3) insisting that skin colors can be neatly sorted into 4-5 discrete categories 4) lamenting the ratio between these categories, without stating what the correct ratio should be, and why

throwaway2077 5y ago
>without stating what the correct ratio should be, and why oh, they don't really hesitate to state that the lower the ratio of a certain group of people is the better. not just in the "melting pot" of the US, but everywhere in the world, including the countries where that group of people is the indigenous population.
mjburgess 5y ago
It's better to read this as just a form of "genuine politics" in the sense that it's one group saying they want more resources than they have. Here, the message is basically: our people want more of what your people have. ("Proper ratios" arent the point). This is what most of these movements are about, a certain type of economic-political warefare most accute when high-status positions are rare and there's a lot of competition for them. I think this perspective also, in some sense, "humanises, justifies and rationalises" this type of agit-prop. Ie., I actually have a lot of sympathy for "genuine politics" -- ie., competition over finite resources and their allocation. It's just some people saying, "we think we're owed more than we have" -- and that's a real political claim everyone, at somepoint, makes justifiably. Here, I say: let them make their demands. It's part of politics. It is likely this author (or their group) wants a resource: a job in journalism. There arent many. If they have some grounds to demand it, let them demand it. (It is however dressed up and disguised in this weird theology of race, gender, etc.).
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  HN is such an idiosyncratic place. You could frame any number of struggles this way and feel smug about being "above it all." "our people want more of what your people have." -> What "your people have" could be freedom from slavery in 1864, ability to attend the same schools, etc. etc. Framing it in this way does not make the argument less compelling and I have no idea why you think that race-based discrimination is a "theology" in a country that had explicit legal discrimination against black people up until the 70s and plenty of informal discrimination afterwards.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    I think it's an anti-smug move: the point is we are all "within it all". Yes, we could talk about systemic racism etc. That is why one might engage in a lot of political projects. However a highly specific demand about ratios in upper-middle-class high-status industries... these specific demands are a little harder to parse. The #metoo movement was not about the masses in the industry, it was about the elites. The academic "fire them" movements (eg., against pinker) are likewise not about the army of PhDs and their sexism. Rather these are intra-elite warfare using somewhat valid grounds to wage an attack on resource-horders. I agreed that these groups have justifiable reasons to make demands; that's partly my point. The issue, where it exists, it their methods. It is very easy to become cynical and take these demands "too literally" as demands for quotas, and for reinstitutionalising racism "as a corrective". Rather, it is better to see them as the same ordinary politics everyone both engages in, and is entitled to engage in. As for the "theology" that refers to the particular dogmatic moralising and evangelising approach taken, and the frequently dubious premises.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      I think you are mistaking the media's tendency to focus on controversy in high-status arenas with a broader cultural/political movement that is not at all exclusively focused on elite status. Calls to integrate schools, calls to reduce our massive incarceration - all of those are designed to be broad based. That those people also want the people who tell media stories and who make political decisions and who run major enterprises to be representative of our population as a whole does not, in my view, indict those people as "elitists." What's wrong with moralizing? I think some things in how our society is structured ought to change. Is that "theology"?
      - mjburgess 5y ago
        > Calls to integrate schools, calls to reduce our massive incarceration... Are, indeed, not what i'm talking about. Most people demanding jobs in journalism arent engaged in projects to reintegrate schools. I'm talking about those demanding the jobs, not MLK.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > our people want...we think we're owed As somebody who is prohibited from having "people", the whole "our people" thing rubs me the wrong way from the beginning.
beaconstudios 5y ago
> fixating on the Third-Reich-esque concept of "human race" what does this mean? I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure the Third Reich was focused on the "German race", to the exclusion of all others. As for ratios, the ratio indicates an uneven pipeline. If idk, programmers were all white and highly rewarded, you might ask why that is. The reason can be one of two things: white people are culturally/systemically advantaged in getting those jobs (for example, those jobs are only available in predominantly-white areas or the education to do the job is more accessible to white people), or white people are more fundamentally capable of programming than others. The former is a social critique, the latter is white supremacy. If you reject the white supremacist position (as you should), then the question becomes whether you can make the system provide more of an equal opportunity.
- twofornone 5y ago
  >white people are culturally/systemically advantaged in getting those jobs (for example, those jobs are only available in predominantly-white areas or the education to do the job is more accessible to white people), or white people are more fundamentally capable of programming than others. The former is a social critique, the latter is white supremacy. Or: "white" culture emphasizes values that tend to produce people who are more interested and/or more capable programmers. The same way that, say, asian immigrants are more likely to value education than other demographics. This white supremacy argument is a disingenuous appeal to the extremely negative connotation of the term and poisons the argument with a dishonest framing, as though the only possible outcome in a perfect meritocracy is equal representation. Nothing about human nature suggests this to be the case. Diversity of opinion also implies diversity of interests. The pipeline problem is not merely a question of unequal opportunity, unless you deny minorities the agency to pursue their own interests. Some groups of people value athletic achievement above intellectual achievement, and it would be unreasonable to expect those demographics to produce a proportional number of competent programmers.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    I agree; I'm not saying that a perfectly fair system would produce ratios identical to demographics. There's always going to be cultural aspects (though the degree to which black and white culture in America are separate is obviously a large part a consequence of racism and slavery). The point is only to use the outcome as a heuristic for what to look into.
rajin444 5y ago
I would desperately love for somebody to tell me #4 and how they got there. Most modern (western) social narratives hinge on looking at high level distribution by sex/race/etc and declaring there’s an issue. Nobody is verifying the correctness of these distributions because there are so many confounds it’s nearly impossible, but they move forward anyways.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Now that university enrollment is roughly 60% female, 40% male, there's very little outcry over this disparity and what little exists is drown out by the continued loud cries that universities are biased against women. It appears the ultimate ideal ratio is infinite of my group, zero of your group.
  - agentdrtran 5y ago
    There's articles written about this every six months or so if you read the news regularly, and they are very sympathetic to the multiple possible reasons for this that negatively affect men in other ways.
  - skrbjc 5y ago
    Actually they are focusing on the STEM fields now saying they enroll too many men.
- Solarsail 5y ago
  (Apologies if this is too much a personal anecdote for HN) Honestly, this is one of the indicators that forces my distrust of the modern family of social discourse. My own suspicions have a specific conversation in 2012 spooking a few hundred people (online), who lashed out with such odd phrasing that it spread contagiously to whoever they met... And formed the chimera movement we see now. ...I might outright have an alternate history of the entire '10s "Culture War". Or I might have gone paranoid. Of course I can't prove any of it. I'd love an answer to your first question myself.
endisneigh 5y ago
When does the author reduce diversity to different skin colors?
- adwn 5y ago
  When their graph titled "Tech Journalism Is Less Diverse Than Tech" only shows "white" vs non-"white". When their statistic, introduced with "highlight of the results", only contains data points about "white" vs non-"white". There's not much else to this article. Therefore, the author reduces diversity to skin colors.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    In the context of the article white and black are supposed to be races and says as much. There are “black people” who are light skinned, and there are people darker than “black people” who are not considered black.
    - adwn 5y ago
      > There are “black people” who are light skinned, and there are people darker than “black people” who are not considered black. Wtf? That's literally the opposite of true. What's next, will you claim that there are "blondes" with brunette hair, and "dark-haired people" who are considered redheads?
      - endisneigh 5y ago
        Black doesn’t mean your skin is literally black, lol. Can’t take you seriously tbh. Are Native Americans Black? Certain Indians? Samoans? Give me a break lol Comparing blondes with Black people is an inane comparison
dang 5y ago
You started a hellish race flamewar with this comment. Not cool. Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. That's just what we don't want here, because it's extremely repetitive. It also almost always turns nasty. Those properties hold true regardless of which ideologies people are battling for or against. All of this is therefore off topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: you badly perpetuated this flamewar downthread. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it again.
- adwn 5y ago
  I'm sorry, dang, that wasn't my intention. I should have known better. It won't happen again.
  - dang 5y ago
    Appreciated!

by adwn 5y ago

throwaway2077 5y ago

>without stating what the correct ratio should be, and why oh, they don't really hesitate to state that the lower the ratio of a certain group of people is the better. not just in the "melting pot" of the US, but everywhere in the world, including the countries where that group of people is the indigenous population.

mjburgess 5y ago

It's better to read this as just a form of "genuine politics" in the sense that it's one group saying they want more resources than they have. Here, the message is basically: our people want more of what your people have. ("Proper ratios" arent the point). This is what most of these movements are about, a certain type of economic-political warefare most accute when high-status positions are rare and there's a lot of competition for them. I think this perspective also, in some sense, "humanises, justifies and rationalises" this type of agit-prop. Ie., I actually have a lot of sympathy for "genuine politics" -- ie., competition over finite resources and their allocation. It's just some people saying, "we think we're owed more than we have" -- and that's a real political claim everyone, at somepoint, makes justifiably. Here, I say: let them make their demands. It's part of politics. It is likely this author (or their group) wants a resource: a job in journalism. There arent many. If they have some grounds to demand it, let them demand it. (It is however dressed up and disguised in this weird theology of race, gender, etc.).

whimsicalism 5y ago
HN is such an idiosyncratic place. You could frame any number of struggles this way and feel smug about being "above it all." "our people want more of what your people have." -> What "your people have" could be freedom from slavery in 1864, ability to attend the same schools, etc. etc. Framing it in this way does not make the argument less compelling and I have no idea why you think that race-based discrimination is a "theology" in a country that had explicit legal discrimination against black people up until the 70s and plenty of informal discrimination afterwards.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  I think it's an anti-smug move: the point is we are all "within it all". Yes, we could talk about systemic racism etc. That is why one might engage in a lot of political projects. However a highly specific demand about ratios in upper-middle-class high-status industries... these specific demands are a little harder to parse. The #metoo movement was not about the masses in the industry, it was about the elites. The academic "fire them" movements (eg., against pinker) are likewise not about the army of PhDs and their sexism. Rather these are intra-elite warfare using somewhat valid grounds to wage an attack on resource-horders. I agreed that these groups have justifiable reasons to make demands; that's partly my point. The issue, where it exists, it their methods. It is very easy to become cynical and take these demands "too literally" as demands for quotas, and for reinstitutionalising racism "as a corrective". Rather, it is better to see them as the same ordinary politics everyone both engages in, and is entitled to engage in. As for the "theology" that refers to the particular dogmatic moralising and evangelising approach taken, and the frequently dubious premises.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    I think you are mistaking the media's tendency to focus on controversy in high-status arenas with a broader cultural/political movement that is not at all exclusively focused on elite status. Calls to integrate schools, calls to reduce our massive incarceration - all of those are designed to be broad based. That those people also want the people who tell media stories and who make political decisions and who run major enterprises to be representative of our population as a whole does not, in my view, indict those people as "elitists." What's wrong with moralizing? I think some things in how our society is structured ought to change. Is that "theology"?
    - mjburgess 5y ago
      > Calls to integrate schools, calls to reduce our massive incarceration... Are, indeed, not what i'm talking about. Most people demanding jobs in journalism arent engaged in projects to reintegrate schools. I'm talking about those demanding the jobs, not MLK.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> our people want...we think we're owed As somebody who is prohibited from having "people", the whole "our people" thing rubs me the wrong way from the beginning.

beaconstudios 5y ago

> fixating on the Third-Reich-esque concept of "human race" what does this mean? I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure the Third Reich was focused on the "German race", to the exclusion of all others. As for ratios, the ratio indicates an uneven pipeline. If idk, programmers were all white and highly rewarded, you might ask why that is. The reason can be one of two things: white people are culturally/systemically advantaged in getting those jobs (for example, those jobs are only available in predominantly-white areas or the education to do the job is more accessible to white people), or white people are more fundamentally capable of programming than others. The former is a social critique, the latter is white supremacy. If you reject the white supremacist position (as you should), then the question becomes whether you can make the system provide more of an equal opportunity.

twofornone 5y ago
>white people are culturally/systemically advantaged in getting those jobs (for example, those jobs are only available in predominantly-white areas or the education to do the job is more accessible to white people), or white people are more fundamentally capable of programming than others. The former is a social critique, the latter is white supremacy. Or: "white" culture emphasizes values that tend to produce people who are more interested and/or more capable programmers. The same way that, say, asian immigrants are more likely to value education than other demographics. This white supremacy argument is a disingenuous appeal to the extremely negative connotation of the term and poisons the argument with a dishonest framing, as though the only possible outcome in a perfect meritocracy is equal representation. Nothing about human nature suggests this to be the case. Diversity of opinion also implies diversity of interests. The pipeline problem is not merely a question of unequal opportunity, unless you deny minorities the agency to pursue their own interests. Some groups of people value athletic achievement above intellectual achievement, and it would be unreasonable to expect those demographics to produce a proportional number of competent programmers.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  I agree; I'm not saying that a perfectly fair system would produce ratios identical to demographics. There's always going to be cultural aspects (though the degree to which black and white culture in America are separate is obviously a large part a consequence of racism and slavery). The point is only to use the outcome as a heuristic for what to look into.

rajin444 5y ago

I would desperately love for somebody to tell me #4 and how they got there. Most modern (western) social narratives hinge on looking at high level distribution by sex/race/etc and declaring there’s an issue. Nobody is verifying the correctness of these distributions because there are so many confounds it’s nearly impossible, but they move forward anyways.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Now that university enrollment is roughly 60% female, 40% male, there's very little outcry over this disparity and what little exists is drown out by the continued loud cries that universities are biased against women. It appears the ultimate ideal ratio is infinite of my group, zero of your group.
- agentdrtran 5y ago
  There's articles written about this every six months or so if you read the news regularly, and they are very sympathetic to the multiple possible reasons for this that negatively affect men in other ways.
- skrbjc 5y ago
  Actually they are focusing on the STEM fields now saying they enroll too many men.
Solarsail 5y ago
(Apologies if this is too much a personal anecdote for HN) Honestly, this is one of the indicators that forces my distrust of the modern family of social discourse. My own suspicions have a specific conversation in 2012 spooking a few hundred people (online), who lashed out with such odd phrasing that it spread contagiously to whoever they met... And formed the chimera movement we see now. ...I might outright have an alternate history of the entire '10s "Culture War". Or I might have gone paranoid. Of course I can't prove any of it. I'd love an answer to your first question myself.

endisneigh 5y ago

When does the author reduce diversity to different skin colors?

adwn 5y ago
When their graph titled "Tech Journalism Is Less Diverse Than Tech" only shows "white" vs non-"white". When their statistic, introduced with "highlight of the results", only contains data points about "white" vs non-"white". There's not much else to this article. Therefore, the author reduces diversity to skin colors.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  In the context of the article white and black are supposed to be races and says as much. There are “black people” who are light skinned, and there are people darker than “black people” who are not considered black.
  - adwn 5y ago
    > There are “black people” who are light skinned, and there are people darker than “black people” who are not considered black. Wtf? That's literally the opposite of true. What's next, will you claim that there are "blondes" with brunette hair, and "dark-haired people" who are considered redheads?
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      Black doesn’t mean your skin is literally black, lol. Can’t take you seriously tbh. Are Native Americans Black? Certain Indians? Samoans? Give me a break lol Comparing blondes with Black people is an inane comparison

dang 5y ago

You started a hellish race flamewar with this comment. Not cool. Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. That's just what we don't want here, because it's extremely repetitive. It also almost always turns nasty. Those properties hold true regardless of which ideologies people are battling for or against. All of this is therefore off topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: you badly perpetuated this flamewar downthread. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it again.

adwn 5y ago
I'm sorry, dang, that wasn't my intention. I should have known better. It won't happen again.
- dang 5y ago
  Appreciated!